There Will Be Blood

“I’m finished,” said Daniel Plainview, as he sat flat on the floor, drunk, blood oozing from the head of the young man whose skull he had just crushed.

Plainview loved money. He loved power. He had plenty of both. As a man who admittedly hated people, he would do anything — anything — to get more money and more power.

In 1927, Upton Sinclair published the novel, Oil! At the time, Sinclair was already well known for writing what has become one of our country’s great literary works, The Jungle, which exposed the abusive and sickening meatpacking monopoly of the day. Now Eric Schlosser has brought Sinclair’s story of oil industry greed back to life in a cinematic version called “There Will Be Blood.”

While viewing this prospect for “Best Picture of the Year,” you may find yourself thinking about where we are today in a society driven by big oil, big meatpacking, big retail, big banking, etc. It’s been nearly one hundred years since Sinclair exposed the meatpacking jungle, the oil cartel, and the greed and ruthlessness of unregulated big business. And it has been nearly one hundred years since our government broke up the monopolistic business trusts.

After viewing the film and experiencing its troubling and vivid display of the worst tendencies of human nature, you might feel — like I do — that we are fully back to the days when profit and power were valued at all costs over people. How far will today’s big business go to increase its own wealth and how far will an independent businessman be pushed in order to compete in a no-holds-barred arena with such dominating and perverse power?

I can say from my perspective in the cattle and meat business that we are certainly back to The Jungle in the meat processing industry. As we fill up our cars and pay our winter heating bills, surely we can’t help noticing the parallels to the old monopoly of Standard Oil.

Today, an unhealthy obsession with money and power has bloodied farmers, ranchers and working people. Like Daniel Plainview, the darkly demented protagonist of Schlosser’s film, our ruthless big business/government partnership will not rest until it finishes wrecking our country.

"An eye opening and heart touching portrait of a culture and industry that we are in great danger of losing. This book will help readers understand the urgency of preserving the Western ranchlands inhabited by families and rural communities that provide nourishing food for our nation, preserve a healthy natural environment and entrust that great American values will endure."
- Mike Callicrate

An Endangered Species

Every month 1,000 ranches go out of production.
It's the national security issue that no one is talking about.

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Food Policy & Law

by John Munsell | Oct 11, 2011
OpinionEditor's Note: This is the first part in a series written by John Munsell of Miles City, MT, who explains how the small meat plant his family owned for 59 years ran afoul of USDA's meat inspection program. The events he writes about began a decade ago, but remain relevant today.

They say that confession is good for the soul. I've been involved in a series of ugly events since my plant in 2002 recalled 270 pounds of ground beef contaminated with E.coli O157:H7 and now want to admit the embarrassing truth for public review.
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